NEOGOV Blog

Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts should be a crucial part of any organization’s recruiting and hiring process. However, it’s easy for DEI webpages with boilerplate phrases like “equal opportunity employer” to be written off as disingenuous if an organization doesn’t put in real work to ensure DEI initiatives are fruitful. 

Our 2021 Diversity Report highlighted important public sector recruitment data from January 2019 to December 2020, with a focus on the discrepancies between Black female and White male candidates.  

Despite a semblance of normalcy on the horizon, the effects of the pandemic will have a significant impact on how local government agencies are run in the future, especially for human resources departments. Government HR leaders have been forced to meet challenges they never had before, in ways they may have never thought possible -- like enabling remote work, designing touchless work spaces, and migrating manual processes to the cloud.

The COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves around the world in 2020, and one of the major effects was on employment, in both the private and public sector. Due to the business closures brought on by the enforced lockdown and the payroll freezes, many news sources including the Wall Street Journal describe the “economic downturn” of the COVID-19 pandemic as the worst recession since the Great Depression caused by the stock market crash of 1929. In fact, the national unemployment rate rose from 4.5% in March 2020 -- close to the record low --  to a record high of 14.7% just one month later (Bureau of Labor Statistics). 

Attracting enough qualified applicants to public sector positions can be challenging. While many applicants are drawn by the prospect of doing meaningful work and supporting their communities, public sector roles are often overlooked by applicants in search of perks the private sector can offer.

In addition to health concerns, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused an upheaval of the public sector job market that has left many workers uncertain about their future. With massive layoffs and a hiring freeze, the US unemployment rate increased to 14.4% in April, the highest since World War II. Learn more about the data behind recruiting in a pandemic below.

According to our survey of 23,310 job seekers between April and June of 2020, 51% reported their job status had changed as a result of the pandemic. The top three reasons that caused a job status change were involuntary, including being laid off (32%), reduced working hours (25%), and being furloughed (18%).

NEOGOV’s partnership with 40+ vendors provides our customers with access to a marketplace of solutions that integrate directly with the NEOGOV platform to allow for seamless sharing of data across systems. We have already facilitated over 1,000 integrations and continue to partner with vendors to offer more solutions to support the entire employee lifestyle.

The unexpected disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic caused many organizations to work remotely for the safety of their workforce. When we asked HR teams whether their teams moved to remote work at some point during the pandemic, 93% said they had. Despite a lack of preparedness, the majority we surveyed back in May found that with flexibility, resourcefulness, and a ton of support from their IT departments, they managed to adjust and persevere.

As American society faces a new reckoning around the subject of discrimination and harassment, government bodies are looking for ways to remedy these problems with legislation. One such topic being addressed by state and local laws in the wake of the #MeToo movement is sexual harassment training, with several states and one major city enacting policies that require employers to ensure their employees are getting this important education and training.

If you are like me, you are more than just a bit off balance with all that is going on in the world. At the end of 2019, things were moving along at a nice clip and we were all excited about the prospect of a robust 2020 -- and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit with a ferocity that we had never seen or could have even imagined. Then, we all saw the senseless murder of George Floyd and other Black civilians replayed over and over across media outlets. As a result, the world exploded into a chaos that is at once compelling and traumatizing, one which many of us still have trouble processing. The issue of race relations and racial injustice symbolized by the Black Lives Matter protests have put issues we have historically been ill-equipped to deal with squarely in our sights.